{"version":"1.0","type":"rich","provider_name":"Acast","provider_url":"https://acast.com","height":250,"width":700,"html":"","title":"Dylan Jones, past master of the long lunch, saw the music world from a restaurant table","thumbnail_width":200,"thumbnail_height":200,"thumbnail_url":"https://open-images.acast.com/shows/5ff0586154e2a73589267809/1793730908186-be36de02-5765-4c3b-90ed-33daea29c1fa.jpeg?height=200","description":"

London restaurants were where musicians, actors, writers and TV stars were seen “and how you knew where they were in the days before social media”. They were a form of theatre with a shifting cast and a way of gauging celebrity status. Dylan Jones – who’s lunched long and hard in the heart of the media – sees that vanishing world as a measure of changing times and fashions in his toothsome new book ‘Table Hopping: the Secret History of London Restaurants’. And pulls up two chairs for us here to look back at …


… the birth of pop culture at the Speakeasy, Ad Lib and the Bag O’ Nails


… Hockney, Jagger, Lucian Freud, the Sex Pistols and Ian Dury’s public beef with Omar Sharif


… “restaurants were about learning how to behave in public”


… Jeffrey Archer and Michael Winner fighting over Lady Di’s table


… Michael Caine and Peter Langan creating the first internationally known London restaurant


… the agony of celebrity hierarchy: “the Beckhams couldn’t get the top table as it was reserved for Harold Pinter”


… Alex James, Damien Hirst and Keith Allen’s “bar tab as long as a bog roll”


… Malcolm McLaren’s doomed Hammer of the Gods movie with Daniel Day-Lewis as Plant, Gary Oldman as Page and Robbie Coltrane as Peter Grant


… “AA Gill could close a restaurant”


… Anthony Bourdain, Marco Pierre White and the rise of the rock’n’roll chefs


… and how the ‘90s are the new ‘60s “where everyone felt they were in the Green Room”.


Order copies of ‘Table Hopping’ here:


https://www.waterstones.com/book/table-hopping/dylan-jones/9780349000725


https://www.amazon.co.uk/Table-Hopping-Restaurants-Brasserie-Wolseley/dp/0349000727


https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/table-hopping-the-secret-history-of-london-restaurants-from-langan-s-brasserie-to-the-wolseley-dylan-jones/2def4f36390c3026?

","author_name":"Mark Ellen, David Hepworth and Alex Gold"}